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How ’bout that Mirai Botnet
Do you remember that thing? It was the panic of the week last fall. Some jerks took large portions of the internet down for a couple hours. Everyone was in a tizzy for a bit. Well, the problem is still there. At least now nobody’s in a flail-your-arms panic over it, so maybe it’s worth discussing solutions.
Since there’s very little reason to remember the panic of the day even a week later, let me remind you how this works. A couple years back “Internet of Things” became the fashionable buzzword, so we all went out and bought WiFi enabled toasters. Now you can start toasting automatically when your alarm clock goes off. The fact that your toast will be ice cold by your seventh snooze is a small price to pay for living in The Future! But when you got your FutureToast, you didn’t bother to change the default password (it’s a hassle and if you did you’d forget the new one and what’s the worst that could happen anyway?) Mr. Nefarious Hacker sees that you’ve got a FutureToast, and he can log into it too. With your toaster and the 13,000 other ones that nobody’s changed the passwords on (and the 3300 GarageNoMores, and 4200 BlindsWithScience, and 132 HubCapConnects) he’s got access to a massive number internet connected devices. Mr. Nefarious Hacker can then use them to form punishing denial of service attacks, making the internet useless to the rest of us.
How do we solve this problem? It seems resistant to market forces. From FutureToast Inc.’s perspective adding security to their toasters makes them cost more and makes them less user friendly. That translates to less toaster sales. The Customer doesn’t care; the fact that his toaster is a tool for world domination doesn’t stop it from providing toast on demand.
If you ask the computer security industry, they tend to tell you “Government Regulation.” Every FutureToast variant has to have a password change on first boot up, mandated by law. This solves the problem in the future, but there’s still a heck of a lot of unsecured devices in existence today. The government is also a good way to take all the vitality out of an industry. Maybe there are better solutions.
You could educate the public. As a rule that never works. Take me as an example. I know this is a thing, and I think it’s a big enough problem to post about it on Ricochet. Now ask me what my password is for my Raspberry Pi. It’s not hard to guess.
You could hack back. If you go into my FutureToast and change the passwords then Mr. Nefarious Hacker can’t use it. But then I can’t use it anymore, either. That approach amounts to the destruction of property. This is also not a good solution.
You could, and I can’t overstate the general applicability of this solution, actively wait for your problem to go away. We haven’t seen Mirai in the news much at all even though nobody’s fixed the problem. Maybe the world wakes up and realizes their fridge really shouldn’t have anything to say to their toilet and they stop buying IoT devices. Maybe we figure out a better way to catch the people behind these attacks and launching them becomes a much riskier proposition. Maybe Russia gets into a war with China and the world’s supply of hackers gets busy fighting one another. Maybe none of those happen and we’re still stuck with the problem.
What do you think, Ricochet? Got any brilliant ideas?
Published in Technology
My shop teacher was missing a finger.
Mine… one and a half.
One of my high school art teachers was missing a finger. He used to be a shop teacher.
Winner.
F
I’ve met some one-eyed carpenters, from zinging nails into their eyes before everyone wore safety glasses. Never met one missing a finger. I’ve heard stories, though. You don’t reach under the board to feel if you’re cutting it all the way through. I did see a guy run his finger into a table saw once, but he didn’t lose it.
When I was three or four years old, my grandparents lived in Siloam Springs, Arkansas, and we stayed with them one summer. There was a little country store with a meat slicer. The lady who owned it, Ada, who we called Aunt Ada, operated the thing, and she had like a total of four fingers left.
My chemistry teacher was missing half a finger.
I think he burned it off.
“Dagnabit Ada! You got pinky in the pastrami again!!”
As long as it ends up on the scale.
We shoulda called her Aunt Lefty.
Hey now: I’m sinistrodexterous! don’t be a hater.
Sounds oxymoronic to me. Does that make me ambiphobic? But I taught myself to hit a softball from either side of the plate — note how I avoid the term switch-hitter.
I’ve never seen that one before. I like it!
I just learned few weeks ago that it’s a very common injury among chemists. The stuff one can pick up on YouTube.
Probably not what they mean when they refer to putting one’s thumb on the scale. But if it means that much to her, I’ll pay the extra $0.50.
Good idea getting it in there though. You had to know it was coming.
I’d give her a buck if she’d remove the thumb.
I thought she already had removed it.
Oh, you meant remove it from the scale. I get it now.
Hands down, she’s the best delicatessen this side of the Mississipp. Oh wait, she’s missing an “I” too.
That was a groaner Skip. Thoroughly enjoyable, but I released an audible groan.
Have you noticed this got derailed again, by another obsession with fingers?
There was a topic?
Wasn’t it something about netting used to keep out bot flies? I can’t remember now.
I could have used one of those nets 50-some years ago, back on the farm. Must be new technology.
No no no. The original post was about toasters that come to life while you’re sleeping and kill you. You need me so much.
Wasn’t there a Disney movie/cartoon that went something like that?
Stephen King novel?
I spent a minute or two trying to work “toast” or “crumbs” into a Stephen King parody title about an hour ago, but had to go do something productive before I came up with anything. Probably for the best.
Maximum Osterdrive?